Ordering Tongs for Thailand

Hi residents of Thailand. I know there are at least a couple of you here. I have a question. Have you ever ordered a whole tong in the bamboo and had it get through Thai customs? I'm ready to start ordering tongs so any advice will be much appreciated.

Thanks for your insight, Bangkung. It all aligns with what I've heard and experienced from ordering other stuff, such as supplements. And my wife (Thai) used to receive lots of shipments in a previous job and tells me the checks are completely random and never to use a courier service. Apparently, it's technically illegal to import health supplements, too but the law is widely ignored due to the sheer volume of incoming packages. Still, customs has the "right" to mess with packages when they feel like it. The first few times I made purchases of tea from China the packages always got opened but by China or Thailand I have no idea. Nothing went missing, though. But to be on the safe side let's not tell them tea makes me high

I have never experienced packages being opened if they came from Japan. In the other hands, there is a very high chance for the packages to be inspected if it came from India or Pakistan. This is what a custom officer told me. For China, I think it depends on how your package looks and the completeness of attached forms.

From my experience, they won't bother to open packages if they are not highly suspected. If they don't believe your declare value, they just use some number from their statistic to calculate the tax. Many times, the residents of Thailand faced the overestimate tax and had to make appeals.

As most here have said: best avoid using EMS, which often gets taxed - not just on the value of contents, but also on the value of postage. Couriers such as FedEx will always get taxed.But it's often completely random, and parcels you expect to get taxed will not be.

Tea shipments, by the way, might earn you lots of face and respect from your postman, as appreciating fine Chinese teas is seen as something quite cultured here. At least that happened to me when my wife explained to our postman, after he asked about the regular parcels from China and Japan he delivers to me.